Time for quiet communications

An internal communication executive imagines the communication program that will help a company go from good to great. For starters, how about spending 80 percent of the time listening to employees?

In Good to Great, Jim Collins reaches a set of conclusions around how 11 select companies moved from average to extraordinary levels of performance independent of their industries. His findings suggest a view of corporate performance that has interesting applications to internal communications. Two conclusions merit particular scrutiny because they raise the possibility that the priorities of some employee communications groups may be awry:

“The good-to-great companies paid scant attention to managing change, motivating people, or creating alignment. Under the right conditions, the problems of commitment, alignment, motivation and change largely melt away.